Identifying and discovering relevant information from a large pool of electronic data is a challenging task. For example, in a discovery process of a litigation case, parties often exchange a great deal of information in electronic format as required by local law or by mutual agreement. Before being turned over to the opposing party, the electronic documents must be reviewed for relevance and screened for privilege. After a document is identified as potentially relevant, it is further reviewed for privilege. Evidence may then be extracted from the relevant electronic documents and further analyzed. Documents may be reviewed either as native files or converted to other forms, such as PDF or TIFF files.
Failure to provide relevant information or inadvertently providing privileged information to the opposing party may subject a party to court sanctions or even adverse judgments. Parties involved in litigation and their counsel typically invest substantial time and effort in reviewing and screening electronic data. The amount of electronic data that must be processed and produced can be overwhelming, raising litigation costs and causing delays in proceedings. When a party discovers later during a case that additional information must be discovered or submitted, the trial may be delayed or interrupted to take additional discovery. The parties must invest additional time and labor in processing and producing the new information.
The infrastructure and resources needed to perform these tasks efficiently is expensive. Maintaining this capability across thousands of individual law firms is duplicative, expensive, and wasteful. Consolidation of these services in a smaller, specialized vendor population may be more efficient and save the client money and provide additional expertise. There remains a need to efficiently and precisely identify relevant information from a large amount of electronic data at an early stage. It is also desired to free parties and their attorneys from burdensome discovery tasks, while allowing the parties and their attorneys to have real-time control of the discovery process.